Powerco customer delivery services tender to open
Tenders open on Tuesday 29 October for the delivery of Powerco’s new customer work model.
As part of a business-wide evaluation to ensure the company is ready to enable Aotearoa to decarbonise, Powerco is moving to a new way of managing its customer delivery services (also known as customer-initiated works or CIW) on its network.
The change will see the company managing the end-to-end customer experience, rather than a customer working directly with a Powerco-approved contractor, Powerco General Manager Electricity Karen Frew says.
Powerco currently has 31 contractors approved to carry out customer work on its network.
“We’re on a journey to improve the experience we give our customers. So that we can have greater oversight of the quality, safety and the service we provide to customers, we’re reducing the number of contractors we directly engage to do customer work,” Karen Frew says.
“While we will reduce the pool of contractors approved to carry out customer work on our network, I want to stress that the volume of work across the network will continue to grow.
“Enabling the energy transition will see a significant increase in customer work from the past. Those awarded tenders, may choose to enter into joint venture or subcontracting relationships with existing Powerco approved contractors as they scale up to meet the expected customer delivery workload to enable New Zealand’s low carbon future.”
The Customer Delivery Services Tender is being run alongside the tender for Powerco’s Electricity Field Services Agreements (EFSAs) for major electricity field services, which opened on October 7.
The EFSA tender runs until November 29, while the Customer Delivery Services tender closes on 19 December. It’s expected that all contracts will be awarded in March 2025 and take effect from 1 July 2025.
The Customer Delivery Services tender will cover the same four regions set out in the EFSAs tender:
- Coromandel to South Waikato
- Western Bay of Plenty
- Taranaki, Whanganui and Rangitīkei
- Manawatū and Wairarapa
The Customer Delivery Services tender is for the entirety of each region, and includes high volume, repeatable connections, as well as a portion of project work, network extensions and upgrades on Powerco's underground and overhead network.